Arts Agenda: Five More Minutes, Mom
When the alarm clock goes off in one short week, the sleepy little galleries around the city will yawn and stretch and, after dressing in their finest contemporary gowns, open their doors for the 2006-2007 season. But while they're busy hitting the snooze for a few more days, we still have plenty of shows to keep us occupied.
>>The National Gallery of Art just opened a new exhibit last Thursday, with 37 artworks from the collection of real estate mogul Edward R. Broida. Defying all talk of bursting bubbles, Broida has assembled some of the finest works from the 20th century and seems happy to share his wealth with the rest of us, most recently at MoMA earlier this summer. A lover of "postwar abstraction and representational art," he has de Koonigs, Kleins, and Gustons to spare. After you've soaked it all in, attend a gallery talk on the show later this month.
>>Need to see art but demand it be brought to you? Someone heard your pleas and launched the Smithsonian Photography Initiative last week. Enter the Frame and bask for hours in the glorious merging of museum walls with Internet tubes. Make your own "collections" by searching keywords from "avant-garde" to "phytoplankton." The Washington Post and Eye Level give some more detail on the project and what it's going to do for photography as an art form.
>>While some waste their time modifying their bodies to ridiculous Hollywood standards, the National Museum of African Art has a rotating exhibit with the body as a canvas for beautiful works of art. Body of Evidence contains works by contemporary African artists who use the human form to explore "shifting perceptions about gender, age, ethnicity, authority, religion, history, and change." At the very least, maybe it'll make you rethink that Fendi tattoo.
>>If you got sucked in by the Anselm Kiefer exhibit at the Hirshhorn - and how could you not - you probably missed the Black Box on the lower level. This new space runs film and video works continually during museum hours. Right now you'll find Jesper Just's short films exploring hundred-dollar word juxtapositions like "bravado versus melancholy" and "macho camaraderie versus suppressed eroticism." When he gets around to doing "crunchy versus creamy" or "Coke versus Pepsi," I'm so there.
>>Don't forget the ongoing exhibits at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Freer Gallery, the Phillips Collection, and the National Geographic Society.
Photo by Flickr user andertho.